Monday-morning bombardiering

The Clinton administration’s decision to bomb a pharmaceutical plant in
Sudan is now being publicly questioned by key aides involved in planning the
attack, according to a report today in The New York Times.

The factory was destroyed 14 months ago by American cruise missiles, based
upon the belief that it was making chemical weapons and was linked to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile suspected of bombing two U.S. embassies in Africa. The administration has since staunchly defended the attack.

But based on interviews by the Times with “key participants,” the decision
to attack was far from easy, with numerous dissenters whose voices were
later squelched.

“Officials throughout the government raised doubts up to the eve of the
attack about whether the United States had sufficient information linking
the factory to either chemical weapons or to bin Laden,” according to the
article. “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and a senior deputy, they
said, encouraged State Department intelligence analysts to kill a report
being drafted that said the bombing was not justified.”

Current and former American officials are reportedly coming forth now to
discuss the operation — code-named Infinite Reach — due to ongoing doubts as to whether the mission was justified.

Among aspects of the plan previously undisclosed, CIA Director George Tenet
warned a connection between bin Laden and the plant could be “drawn only
indirectly and by inference.”

The national security adviser, Samuel Berger, who said no one had questioned whether the factory, known as Al Shifa, was an appropriate target, refuted that claim.

One piece of evidence cited by the administration as evidence of chemical
weapons production there was a soil sample taken from 60 feet away. It
contained about 2.5 times the normal trace amount of a chemical used to
produce VX nerve gas. The sample had been taken from land apparently not
owned by Al Shifa.

Shortly after the operation, the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and
Research began preparing a report on the lack of evidence tying Al Shifa to
bin Laden. Both the Secretary of State and Under Secretary Thomas Pickering, who felt there was “nothing new” to report, halted the never-completed report, which would have sharply questioned the bombing.

Other senior officials who believe the attack was not justified include Jack
Downing, the head of the CIA’s clandestine espionage section, and the agency ‘s Counterterrorism Center, which had collected the intelligence on the site.

The Aug. 20, 1998, attack came on the same day that former White House
intern Monica Lewinsky gave testimony to a grand jury investigating a sexual
scandal involving President Clinton.